Mobile video is quickly becoming a mass consumer phenomenon, much as digital photos were earlier in the smartphone adoption cycle. In a recent report, BI Intelligence analyzes the impact of 4G LTE and device design improvements on mobile video growth, examines who watches mobile video and how they watch it, and details the mobile video monetization opportunity. 

QUESTION Does innovation trump growth?

PROFESSOR David Allmark, Executive Vice President Of Fisher-Price+

TOPIC Innovation

Regardless of where you live, starting up a business and growing it through its early stages is difficult. As the chief strategy officer for SoftLayer, I’ve had the opportunity to mentor hundreds (if not thousands) of entrepreneurs and startups who were selected to join our Catalyst Startup Program, so I often find myself responding to questions about everything from business mechanics and corporate culture in Canada to conflict resolution and branding in Europe.

Every startup faces unique trials and tribulations, but I’ve noticed that there is a universality to the challenge of keeping a new business alive through the first few years.

I always advise software startups to file patents to protect their “secret sauce” from competitors, and to increase their valuation. The good news is that a patent can scare off or at least delay competitors, and as a “rule of thumb” patents can add up to $1M to your startup valuation for investors, or for M&A exits (merger and acquisition).

The bad news is that patent trolls (non-practicing companies that make their money from licensing patents) can squeeze the lifeblood out of unsuspecting entrepreneurs, as exemplified by the continuing mess around Lodsys suing small Apple IOS developers. This patent holding company has charged infringement and demanded royalties from every app developer for the iPhone and Android, for a feature most agree has been in apps for many years.

After University of Utah engineers Joey Wilson and Neal Patwari perfected new technology that "sees" through walls, they started a company to market it for security and in rescues. Now they envision health care uses for "tomographic motion detection," which their Salt Lake City firm Xandem Technology LLC is exploring in hopes of creating unobtrusive ways to monitor a patient’s breathing or an elderly person’s movements.

"We have a prototype and are doing work on the algorithm to improve the results," said Patwari, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Recent tests "relate to elder care where you want to monitor someone in their home, not just when they’re in bed connected in a sensor."

It wasn't always easy, that's for sure. But sometimes the gold standard just isn't for you. Lessons in finding the right fit--and never giving up--from the founders of second fashion marketplace Twice.

The words “entrepreneur” and “dropout” are often associated; think Mark Zuckerberg, leaving Harvard for bigger things, or the young people goaded and funded by Peter Thiel. It’s easy to imagine a college student planning to drop out of school to join Y Combinator; rarer, though, is the person who has gotten his startup into that famous accelerator, only to abandon it.

Yet that’s what Noah Ready-Campbell did. He and his business partner, Calvin Young, both ex-Googlers, joined the Y Combinator program in the summer of 2011. Within a week or two, they dropped out--becoming, so far as they’re aware, only the second team to ever do so.

Generally, the holidays are a time for extended shopping hours, vacations, and family. In the small business and startup world “days off” are few and far between, and many business owners hardly take time to eat, let alone take days off. With the holidays quickly approaching, it’s important to find time away from the business to spend time with family, recharge the batteries, and get a fresh perspective heading into the new year.

I asked eight entrepreneurs how they manage to find a balance between taking time off for the holidays and making sure their business are running at all cylinders:

In my book “Your Last Day of School” I write that there are two good reasons to do an internship. They are:

1) To get access to special information

and/or

2) To network with people

Sometimes however, I encounter young professionals who are involved with an internship for another reason – a bad reason.

They’re just there for the label.

Millennials are taking over the workplace. In some areas, like tech startups, they already dominate and frequently manage older colleagues. Businesses that want to stay competitive and be as dynamic as those startups need to learn how this generation thinks in order to know how to manage them. 

Notwithstanding plastic surgery, health improvements and other modern biological enhancements, we are all getting older, and the country is too. Today roughly 18.5% of the U.S. population is over 60, compared to 16.3% a decade ago; by 2020 that percentage is expected to rise to 22.2%, and by 2050 to a full 25%.

Yet the graying of America is not uniform across the country — some places are considerably older than others. The oldest metropolitan areas, according to an analysis of the 2010 census by demographer Wendell Cox, have twice as high a concentration of residents over the age of 60 as the youngest. In these areas, it’s already 2020, and some may get to 2050 aging levels decades early.

Ask any manager or any leader in today’s marketing organizations and they’ll tell you just how important it is to have “the right people in the right seats.”  It’s critical to determine not just whether you have the right people but whether you have the right seats.

Whether working with external agencies or consultants or internal stakeholders, marketers must master teaming behavior. In this article, learn about "Teamabiity", a new role-based approach to work that is changing the way that organizations are looking at talent management.

Over in Belgium, scientists have finally taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses. Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens. To do it, they had to come up with new kinds of "conductive polymers" – and mold them into "a very thin, spherically-curved substrate (surface) with active layers."

Time has proven that even 22 years ago climate scientists understood the dynamics behind global warming well enough to accurately predict warming, says an analysis that compares predictions in 1990 with 20 years of temperature records.

After an adjustment to account for natural fluctuations, the predictions and the observed increases matched up, the current research found.

The predictions in question come from the first climate assessment report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990. The IPCC is an internationally accepted scientific authority on climate change, drawing on the expertise of thousands of scientists, so its reports carry special weight. The most recent assessment report came out in 2007.

Every entrepreneur needs to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and realistic about their reasons for choosing the startup route. For any entrepreneur, even the best business opportunities, if entered for the wrong reasons, will likely fail. Some of these reasons seem obvious, so forgive me for restating, but I still hear them too often.

Statistics show that at least 50% of new startups fail within five years, and many of the survivors eventually fail. If you don’t want to be part of these statistics, consider all the alternatives to starting your own business, especially if you have one of the following perspectives:

My wife & I have a close friend who recently entered the workforce for his first-ever job. On his first day of work my wife was kind enough to write down words of wisdom from her years on the job.

I don’t write about Tania very often – mostly at her request. Otherwise I’d shout from the mountain tops how smart & capable she is. She’s a Brown undergrad, Wharton MBA, ex strategy consultant and ex Googler. She’s worked for L’Oreal, Accenture, Virgin Mobile & BSkyB (one of the leading media companies in the UK).

Every year, we see a number of publications issue their top 50 lists of the world's most innovative companies. In recent years, there have been rankings issued by Forbes.com, Fast Company, and MIT Technology Review to name just a few. Looking back across 2012, I wanted to find out which companies ranked "Best of the Best Innovators" across all these top 50 lists by combining them to gain a broader perspective that leverages the unique evaluation criteria of each individual study.

Each of the rankings have their own methodology for determining who's on the list. The priorities range from highly complex financial calculations to selections based upon the launch of recent innovations that are having a significant impact across industry and our culture.

It has been a big year in innovation, and in innovation management systems, as well.  A couple obvious phenomena popped up and deserve to be noted.  Perhaps, it will give others food for thought as they close out the year and get ready for 2013.  Here are some trends I’ve picked up by talking to those responsible for innovation at large organizations over this past year.

1.    The short term challenge.  Although there is a general acceptance of social networks to serve as the technology backbone supporting innovation (with strong idea management attributes), short burst challenges to collect ideas on a given topic are in more demand.

Covering everything from what to pack to where to go to how to get there, these apps, gadgets (and an ostrich pillow!) help take the edge off your holiday travel stress.

From figuring out what to pack to planning an agenda appealing enough for the whole family, traveling can be a nightmare. But with the help of a few apps and gadgets designed to ease each step of the way, you can free up time to do more of what the holidays are meant for: relaxing. Here, we've rounded up 13 tools to help you make it to 2013 in one piece:

Google just released its 2012 Zeitgeist, its annual collection of trending search topics across the globe.

Topping overall search trends for the year were: Whitney Houston, the pop diva who died earlier this year;  Gangnam Style, the hilarious dance (and YouTube’s most-watched video) by Korean singer Psy; and Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged the New York and New Jersey in October.

Google says it powered 1.2 trillion searches across 146 languages during 2012. An Android Google Zeitgeist app is coming later today, while an iOS app is coming soon.

New Zealand’s Sir Ray Avery has a simple method for getting the most out of his life. The 65-year old Kiwi scientist and inventor accomplishes what he does by keeping tabs on the days he has left to live, and by setting and tracking daily goals to best take advantage of them.

“I’ve got about 5,625 days to live,” Avery told a group of American entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists visiting the country as part of 500 Startups’ latest Geeks On A Plane event. “When you’re born, you’re born with 30,000 days. That’s it. The best strategic planning I can give to you is to think about that.”